It ranks alongside the worst excuses in football. Having failed to sign the experienced striker he was chasing in the final hours of the summer transfer window, Damien Comolli, the Tottenham sporting director, blamed "agent activity".

Yes, the Frenchman would have got away with it if it hadn't been for those meddling agents, the very people he must nurture to help press transfer deals over the line, which is, essentially, the purpose of his employment. Comolli had not delivered but hang on, those agents, eh? What can you do?

"I am particularly disappointed that we were unable to make one additional signing, another experienced striker," he said in a prepared statement (is there any other medium through which Tottenham directors communicate with supporters?).

"The deal was agreed but fell through in the final moments due to agent activity," he went on. "It is all too often that judgments are made on how these deals are or are not concluded and the reality and the reasoning that happens is often very different and highly unpredictable."

Comolli is on thin ice, his record under increasing scrutiny. Even Daniel Levy, his chairman, said in another prepared statement: "I cannot deny that I share with them [the supporters] a disappointment that we couldn't add further to replace attacking options." Worryingly for Comolli, Levy is not a man who generally carries the can.

Tottenham insist that the signing of players is a committee effort, that Comolli and Juande Ramos, the manager, have an equal say and Levy, the chief holder of the purse strings, has his input too. But during the final fraught weeks of the summer transfer window, which coincided with the team's poor start to the new season - their 2-1 home defeat by Aston Villa on Monday kept them rooted to the foot of the table - the tensions have not been difficult to discern.

Comolli has been guilty of some dubious purchases - Younes Kaboul, Kevin-Prince Boateng and Darren Bent at a combined £30m in the summer of last year are perhaps his poorest - yet the policy of deadline-day brinkmanship, of staring down rival clubs to wring every last penny from a deal, predates him.

That is Levy's domain and it is he who accepts or signs the cheques. Never mind the collateral damage of the Dimitar Berbatov affair, he was delighted to have extracted £30.75m from United for the Bulgarian, and he could not turn down Liverpool's £20m for Robbie Keane. The £16m Sunderland offered for Steed Malbranque, Pascal Chimbonda and Teemu Tainio represented further good business in his eyes.

When he is in the market for a player, Levy, the ceaseless haggler, will not pay over the odds. He authorised the walking away from a series of deals last month, including the one at the 11th hour for the extra striker that the club needed, believed to be Real Zaragoza's Sergio García, who was eventually bought by Real Betis. Financial imperatives appear to be the bottom line; the fallout from missed opportunities or damaging sagas must simply be man-managed, however problematic that might be. And like every good politician, Levy tends to have somebody else in front of him when the bullets are flying.

Ramos is not an outspoken man. His forward defensive in press conferences would make Geoffrey Boycott grunt appreciatively. Yet he has repeatedly railed at the way that the business end of the summer market overlaps with the beginning of the season, calling it "one of the most unpleasant things that currently exist in the game", and, more pertinently, has questioned why Tottenham insisted upon leaving important pieces of business until the very last moment. "The ideal situation is that you get your squad settled early and you work with all the players in the pre-season period," he said.

When the dust had settled on another helter-skelter deadline day at White Hart Lane, Berbatov and his strike partner Keane had added to the departure of another free-scoring forward, Jermain Defoe, in January. In their stead, Roman Pavlyuchenko arrived from Spartak Moscow and Fraizer Campbell joined on loan from Manchester United. With the admission that they had failed to get another body in up front, it is impossible to argue that Ramos's squad is not weaker in this department and a host of creative midfielders - Tottenham signed Luka Modric, Giovani dos Santos and David Bentley - does not redress the imbalance.

Moreover, as the midfielder Malbranque, one of Tottenham's best players last season, was allowed to leave, the club lost further Premier League experience. Modric and Giovani have appeared bewildered at the frenetic pace of the English game. They will doubtless come good and, in time, the disparate parts of the team will gel to produce consistent performances. But it will take time and Tottenham can ill afford to lose further ground in the Premier League over the next few weeks.

Roll on the January transfer window.

Slow starters

This is the third consecutive season Spurs have lost three of their four opening Premier League games